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Hire people who give a shit

alexw.substack.com

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Re: Hire people who give a shit

#131

Post by beny23 »

I think the general idea of finding people who take pride in a job well done is a sound one and does often mean the difference between success and failure of a project/business.

Where the article completely falls down in is how to measure “giving a shit”. There’s plenty of people that work long hours, get rewarded well but ultimately just create mess after mess that someone who cares about clean, simple code then cleans up after them.

A culture that just values attendance is most likely going to have a negative impact on the motivation. I remember a situation where a delivery lead shouting “nobody leaves the office before this bug is fixed” leading me to question the values of a client.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that gimmicks like pool tables in the office and slides make an iota of difference to someone that gives a shit about software.

What does make a difference is a culture that encourages initiative, values transparency and pragmatism. These are the kinds of things you want hear when being interviewed. How many hours did you work will/should turn the real talent away...

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#132

Post by mettamage »

> For example, it’s absolutely shocking that the common paradigm for engineers at Google is to come in at 11am and leave at 4pm. In no world can you be working 5 hours a day and be giving a shit, and so the conclusion is that very little meaningful work gets done at Google.

When I was a poker player, I learned that playing less meant earning more (per hour). Focus can only be sustained on the top-level for so long. When I played poker, I cared a lot.

When I started working later, I noticed the same thing. The quality of focus is simply less. It's still valuable enough to produce something, but not to produce something top of line. Simply test yourself on the first hour with a difficult problem and on the eighth hour. Your first hour self will run circles around you.

So I can imagine that there are very attuned HR professionals that know this and see this and want to take advantage of this. Rare they may be, I'd be one of them if I'd work in the field.

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#133

Post by ska »

svrma wrote: post #116

The comments here at HN are quite harsh imho and I feel bad for possibly ruining someone's day. Is there a way for me to delete the submission? I posted it on HN as I liked the points in the article. The points in the post are reasonable provided there's fair equity for the employees (which I believe is disclosed prior to joining - I have no knowledge about dilution, preference etc). I also agree with the commenters…

  > The points in the post are reasonable provided there's fair equity for the employees
This is maybe a fair argument for a very small number of founding engineers, who start with multiple percentage points. The idea that it extends to employee 200 is a fantasy because you are asking them to commit to a degree that you will never be able to commit in them.

Give a shit about your employees first, and you will find employees that give a shit about you. Asking them to centre their lives around your company when you will easily sacrifice them at needs is deeply flawed.

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#134

Post by justin_oaks »

ragona wrote: post #12

Yikes. I would never work for that person after reading that article. “I started a company and I’m totally wild about it. It is my life. If it is not your life too then you don’t belong here.” Founders are supposed to be obsessed with their company. (Though I question that too.) But demanding everyone else at the company be just as obsessed is doomed to hire children and sycophants and drive off professionals who hav…

I worked at a startup and I could tell that the founders viewed the company as if it were their baby. They wondered why their employees, the "babysitters", didn't give the same effort and attention to their baby as we did. That is, no weeks significantly past 40 hours, no responding to email after hours, etc.

If you think of it in terms of babies and babysitters, it's clearly absurd to expect the babysitter to bend over backwards to help your child outside their paid duty. Yet the founders can't see it.

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#135

Post by bridanp »

svrma wrote: post #116

The comments here at HN are quite harsh imho and I feel bad for possibly ruining someone's day. Is there a way for me to delete the submission? I posted it on HN as I liked the points in the article. The points in the post are reasonable provided there's fair equity for the employees (which I believe is disclosed prior to joining - I have no knowledge about dilution, preference etc). I also agree with the commenters…

It should definitely be left up. It’s okay to have that world view at his age, and it is probably serving him well right now. I remember being 22-23 and wondering why everyone didn’t want to work 12 hours a day. Why were some leaving before 5, some came in late, some just in general did not give a shit. Here I was working hard not only to learn brand new systems, but build a disaster recovery plan, capacity planning, and production control scheme from scratch. And trying to finish my degree on the side. While I’m doing all of this, these shiftless people were making excuses about kids having to be places, or wives who wanted their husbands home, or people who always seemed to be sick. I didn’t understand.

I’m 47 now and I completely understand. Over time, I realized that there was life outside of work. Kids were actually fun to hang around, and my wife is my best friend. Not my job, and not my coworkers, the wife I chose to spend time with actually is fun to spend time with.

I get what Alexandr is saying, I really do. Except for the CEO bit, I had the same world view 25 years ago. And it’s a good world view for that age. However life will change, our experiences will broaden, and I feel he will probably have a completely different idea 20 years from now.

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#136

Post by heavyset_go »

ditonal wrote: post #124
torgian wrote: post #111

Lol. You can’t work only five hours a day _and_ still “give a shit”, according to the article. Sounds like someone full of himself. I’m never going to work more than 8 hours a day for a company, preferably less even. I still get more stuff done in those hours that I do work. I care a lot about what I do, but I’m not going to destroy myself or my life for someone else’s company. Already did that for the military, neve…

Scale AI is an embarrassment to YC in general, as the founders embody every negative trope we’ve come to associate with the worst of the scene. The Youtuber Joma Tech has an excellent takedown on the sheer arrogance of their founder. https://youtu.be/HTXTVfBCeSY The fetishization of a youthful founder, the ridiculous interview questions, and as I personally made the mistake of doing a phone screen with them before le…

The founder's comments on the YouTube video are just so embarrassing.

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#138

Post by balfirevic »

rob74 wrote: post #57

Not a native speaker, but for me "giving a shit" doesn't sound like you really care for something. Ok, it's (maybe) better than "not giving a shit", which is nothing at all, but it's not much more than the bare minimum...

Thankfully, Ismo explains it all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igh9iO5BxBo

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#139

Post by michaelyoshika »

svrma wrote: post #116

The comments here at HN are quite harsh imho and I feel bad for possibly ruining someone's day. Is there a way for me to delete the submission? I posted it on HN as I liked the points in the article. The points in the post are reasonable provided there's fair equity for the employees (which I believe is disclosed prior to joining - I have no knowledge about dilution, preference etc). I also agree with the commenters…

I don't feel "running a 200 person company (ref: article) at 23" is remarkable if you look at who runs a 328.2 million person country now.

Running a company is a different skillset from getting to the position.

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#140

Post by justin_oaks »

sodapopcan wrote: post #114
achenatx wrote: post #65

I strongly disagree with this post for my company. But that is great, it means there is a company for everyone. At my company one of our most important values is "live the life you love". For each person we try to understand how the company can help them achieve their personal goals. If someone wants to work a ton of hours to get promoted as fast as possible, we support that. But if they want a balanced life we suppo…

We call working long hours “heroics” at my company, it’s possibly a common term? I’m unsure. In any event, Heroics are strongly discouraged. There are people who do it, of course, but they get no special accolades for it and in turn they don’t do any kind of boasting about it.

I've also heard of "heroes" as referring to software developers that are seen as great by management because they're always working hard to put out fires (usually that they caused). Meanwhile those who write stable software and work normal hours are not praised because stability is not noticed.

Now that I think about it, I guess we're talking about the same thing.

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